Kees Kousemaker
| Comic book store, art gallery | |
| Industry | Comic books, art |
| Founded | November 8, 1968 |
| Founder | Kees Kousemaker |
| Headquarters | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
| Products | Comic books |
| Website | lambiek |
Galerie Lambiek is a Dutch comic book store and art gallery in Amsterdam, founded on November 8, 1968 by Kees Kousemaker. From 1968 to 2015 it was located in the Kerkstraat, but in November 2015 the store moved to the Koningsstraat 27.
The Lambiek website is one of the longest-running resources about comics and cartoonists on the Internet. The website features a web shop for comic books, eComics, and original art, as well as a news page with articles of interest to comics fans and online art exhibitions. The flagship of the site is the Comiclopedia, an illustrated compendium of over 13,500 international comic artists. The site also features a history of Dutch comics, mostly researched and written by Kees Kousemaker.
The name "Lambiek" originated as a misspelling of the name of the comics character Lambik, from the popular Suske & Wiske comic book series created by Belgian artist Willy Vandersteen. The logo of the shop is an image from the Suske en Wiske album Prinses Zagemeel (Princess Sawdust).
The store has held exhibitions of art by comic creators, including Robert Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Erik Kriek, André Franquin, Tanino Liberatore and Chris Ware. The shop and the informational website both have a strong focus on underground comics, graphic novels and autobiographical comics. The exhibitions can be profit or non-profit, depending on the subject of the exposition.
Kees Kousemaker (1942-2010) was a Dutch comics expert, born in Steenbergen, Netherlands. He first arose to prominence when he opened Lambiek in November 1968, the first specialized comic book store in Europe and the second oldest worldwide after Gary Arlington's San Francisco Comic Book Company which was established earlier that year in April, according to the Lambiek website. Actually, an even older comic book store is known to have opened its doors in May 1967, George Henderson's Canadian, Toronto-based Memory Lane Books (itself a continuation of the Viking Bookshop he had already opened on another location in the spring of 1966), making Lambiek the third oldest store. All three stores had the strong focus on underground comics in common. With Memory Lane Books no longer in existence since the 1980s and the closure of Arlington's store in 2002, Lambiek therefore has become the oldest comic book store still in existence as of 2017. As a result of his exhibitions and attention to the early work of young cartoonists such as Peter Pontiac and Joost Swarte, he established collaborations and friendships with many Dutch and international artists. Kousemaker also published books about Dutch comic culture. Kousemaker died April 27, 2010.
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